Interviews

The Legacy Project: explorations into creating legacy projects for end of life is funded by The Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Travelling Fellowship Award. Here are a selection of interviews from my research around legacy projects for hospital, hospice and home in the USA and Canada.

INTERVIEWS

StoryCorps Legacy Initiative is part of the hugely successful StoryCorps project which records conversations and interviews between everyday people living in America. Lauren Brooks, a third year internal medicine resident, brought StoryCorps Legacy Initiative to Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Centre in Baltimore, MD, and recorded the stories of people living with serious illnesses. PRN met Lauren to find out more about the project.

Claudia Biçen is a self taught artist who is fascinated by the human condition. Her series of drawings and interviews of people close to the end of life is the result of a two year exploration into a question Claudia has been transfixed by since being a small child: how should we live? PRN interviewed Claudia about her beautiful project 'Thoughts in Passing' as part of The Legacy Project: an exploration into creating legacies at end of life.

How can we start conversations about death and dying, and how do we begin to redesign end of life care? I travelled to San Francisco and met people involved in projects to encourage discussion around the one certainty that connects us all.

How can we make sense of narrative within medicine? I visit StoryCorps Legacy Initiative headquarters in Brooklyn, and discover how Mount Sinai Hospital in New York and the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco are embracing StoryCorps as well as weaving narrative into everyday practice.

The Morbid Anatomy Museum, in Brooklyn, New York, is a unique space which describes itself as “a non-profit institution dedicated to the celebration and exhibition of artifacts, histories and ideas which fall between the cracks of high and low culture, death and beauty, and disciplinary divides.” I visited to find out more.

Scientist and artist Dr Tyler Nordgren has a most ethereal job title. As Night Sky Ambassador for the U.S National Park Service he is responsible for promoting astronomy education and encouraging the public to see natural nocturnal landscapes in unspoiled environments where 'Half the park is after dark.' PRN finds out more...